Research Discipline(s)
Brief Biography (English)
Sindiso Mnisi Weeks is Assistant Professor in Public Policy of Excluded Populations at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Adjunct Associate Professor in Public Law at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She previously served as a senior researcher in the Centre for Law and Society at UCT, where she worked in the Rural Women’s Action Research Programme (now the Land and Accountability Research Centre), combining research, advocacy and policy work on women, property, governance, dispute management, and participation under customary law and the South African Constitution. Mnisi Weeks received her DPhil from the University of Oxford’s Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, as a Rhodes Scholar, and previously clerked for then Deputy Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, Dikgang Moseneke. She has since taught African Customary Law in the Department of Private Law at UCT, Law and Society in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and for the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2013-2014, Mnisi Weeks was a resident scholar at the University of New Hampshire School of Law, where she held a fellowship for the preparation of a book manuscript that has since been published under the title, Access to Justice and Human Security: Cultural Contradictions in Rural South Africa (2018), as part of Routledge, Taylor and Francis’s Cultural Diversity and Law series. She is also the co-author of African Customary Law in South Africa: Post-Apartheid and Living Law Perspectives (OUPSA, 2015) and a contributing author of two leading South African law textbooks, South African Constitutional Law in Context and Family Law in South Africa, both published by OUPSA in 2021, as well as the Oxford Handbook on Law and Anthropology (OUP, 2021). Mnisi Weeks's latest projects include co-authoring, with Heinz Klug and Sanele Sibanda, a book on Rule of Law in Context: South Africa (Hart Publishing) and preparing a new sole authored monograph whose working title is Behind the Veil of Isidwaba: Rural South African Women Lay Down the Law. As a social justice thinker and scholar-activist, she continues to support the advocacy efforts of the Alliance for Rural Democracy in South Africa and also publishes in the popular press. Mnisi Weeks's work has been highly rated by the National Research Foundation and she has received a number of awards, including the Women in Science Award for the Development of Rural Women through Science and Technology, as well as support from the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program and Social Science Research Council–Mellon Mays Graduate Initiatives Program. She serves on the boards of several educational and legal non-profits and is an in-coming editor of one of the American Anthropological Association's official journals, Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), on whose editorial board she has served since 2019.
